In and Out of Love

I am looking out of my airplane window. It is night and below me the millions of twinkling lights form the shape of a city I have come to call home. We are slowly getting closer to the ground, but we are still high enough to feel how small we really are. So many people down there falling in and out of love. Everyday someone meets someone special and every day at least one heart gets broken.

So many people so much loneliness and for others the price they pay for company is too high.

There was a time I said: I have so much love to give, but nobody seems to want it.

Then came a time I noticed I had given all I got and ran all out of love.

Wouldn’t it be great to find some balance?

Today I think of someone that I wanted to love, but as I never heard anything I assumed it meant nothing.

Nearly twenty years later I found a postcard saying how wonderful it had been and how he would love to see me again soon. Someone had decided for us that we weren’t meant to be. As painful as it was, it was too late.

I think of the time that I loved so much but that love wasn’t returned: it taught me young enough that loving is better than being loved. When you could just sit in silence and revel in the beauty of someone’s hands, eyebrows, voice, laugh, stories. I couldn’t understand that something that felt so right, felt so meant to be, only felt like that for me.

And the lost lover that suddenly seems so close again. A few words and a world of memories overtakes the grim reality of the daily grind in lockdown.

I hope to love again one day. Preferably in this lifetime. A love that doesn’t feel like there is a bill attached to every bit of tenderness received. Every touch measured and perceived too light.

Can love be passionate and peaceful at once? Are we still able to be interested and enjoying? Does loving changes it meaning to I acknowledge your pain, can we move on or is this just what it is from now on. We come together and examine each other’s baggage?

I like love to be like art. Something you can look at and enjoy. Enjoy the little fires of surprise, an unsuspected colour combination, a line that is nothing more than a thin divide between black and white yet so delicate.

No need to fully understand. No need to control. Leave the analysis to the critics and just be for a while, and feel for a while and just love that it’s there.